Currently the security model is at the page level so you can have role driven forums if you place them on different pages with different view/edit roles.
In the next release there will be RSS available for the forums as well. It is already in svn, all that is left to implement is actually showing the links for RSS feeds in the forums. By using the RSS feature in combination with the RSS aggregator feature it is possible to show say the 10 most recents posts on the home page of a site. You can see this in action on
http://www.mono-live.org where Joseph Hill is using the RSS Aggregator on his home page to show the recent posts in his forums. Joseph implemented the RSS feature in the forums recently.
Other than that I am not working on any new features until I finish converting to take advantage of the 2.0 .NET features. In particular I want to convert all the existing mopdules to Web Parts. Once that is done I will pick up again with adding new features and enhancing existing ones